The Music Lesson – Victor L. Wooten

Thoughts: I had heard a lot of good things about this book, but came away from it nonplussed. There were a handful of ideas that I found useful, but on the whole, the book was too new-agey for me. Here are the quotes I thought worth copying down:

(The notes below are not a summary of the book, but rather raw notes - whatever I thought, at the time, might be worth remembering.)

Wooten, Victor L. 2006. The Music Lesson: A Spiritual Search for Growth Through Music. Berkley.

• 13: “You should never lose the groove in order to find a note.”
• 48: “We can’t avoid making mistakes, but we can get comfortable with them, especially if we practice making them.”
• 95: “If I have a musical passage that I want to play, but don’t yet possess the required technique, I will focus on that technique just long enough to understand the exact movements required to do it in the most efficient way.”
• 110: in music and life, always strive to help the widest group possible - always draw the circle wider. “Strive to make all Life better, and you will have all of Life’s power backing you.”